For those few still reading, I'll go into a little more detail about the
book. Atul Gawande is an
associate professor at the Harvard School of Public Health and an
associate professor of surgery at Harvard Medical school. I thought this
book was the first thing by Gawande I've read, but I discovered while
researching this review that Gawande also wrote a very highly-regarded
piece in the New Yorker about why medical costs are out of control in
the United
States.
I liked that piece very much, and was tickled to learn the same author
wrote "The Checklist Manifesto."

Gawande starts by establishing the need for checklists by discussing the
things that can go wrong in surgery, even with highly competent,
intelligent, and motivated teams of people. He makes the point very well
that when things get complicated enough, no human has the capacity to
work well without checklists. He then goes into the benefits we can get
from creating and using checklists correctly, and talks about techniques
for making useful, effective checklists that people will actually use.

The book is full of real examples of problems and solving those problems
through checklists, not only from the world of medicine but from
construction, aviation, and other realms. "The Checklist Manifesto" is
entertaining and easy to read, but also very useful. I was already very
much a believer in checklists; this book didn't do anything to increase
my use of checklists. (Although it did increase my confidence in
insisting that I and others at my company use checklists regularly.)

Where this book really shined, at least for me, was in the sections on
how to write effective checklists. It's easy to produce well-meaning
checklists that are overwhelmingly large, vague, or otherwise impossible
to use in a timely manner. "The Checklist Manifesto" gave me practical
tips and techniques to use, based mostly on how aviation checklist are
made, to create my own practical and useful checklists. The only quibble
that I have with the book, and it's a minor one, is the heavy emphasis
in it on medical examples. I suppose that's inevitable (and excusable),
given the author's profession. Even though I intend to use these tips in
a software development environment, rather than an operating theater,
they're general enough that I think I'll be able to do that. Highly
recommended.